The New York Times is running my review of Richard Dawkins’s new book The Ancestor’s Tale this weekend.

I’m particularly grateful at times like these to have a blog, where I can add extra information and the occasional correction.

Towards the start of the review I mention a remarkable tree of 3,000 species. You can download a pdf here. It’s files like these that the zoom function were made for.

Towards the end of the review, I say that jellyfish and humans share a common ancestor that lived perhaps a billion years ago. There’s plenty of debate about early animal evolution, but a billion years is probably too old–700 million or 800 million would have been better. Maybe I was thinking about fungi instead of jellyfish.

When I have a little more time today, I’ll blog about some of the things that I think Dawkins should have included in his book but didn’t.